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No matter how bad it gets, Earth will always be more habitable than anywhere else. But even if humans survive for millions of years, we’ll never get back what w
by Kaibeezy 4y ago
No matter how bad it gets, Earth will always be more habitable than anywhere else. But even if humans survive for millions of years, we’ll never get back what we have now.
- ben_w 4y agoOther than the easily available fossil fuels, this planet will be essentially back to the wild state a few tens of millennia after a hypothetical catastrophic collapse in technology.
- wizofaus 4y agoIf humans survive for millions of years we'll almost certainly transform the planet vastly further than anything even conceived of so far (except perhaps in SciFi). And I wouldn't assume that even within a few 1000 years Earth will be more habitable than elsewhere (but yes, it's almost guaranteed for the next century or so at least). OTOH, if we really did somehow totally self-destruct as a species, there's good reason to suppose the climate would settle back to something similar to what it has been the last 10k years, though it certainly won't last forever, or even much more than a dozen or so more thousand years.
- maybelsyrup 4y ago> there's good reason to suppose the climate would settle back to something similar to what it has been the last 10k years What's that good reason?
- wizofaus 4y agoMy understanding is that the natural CO2 cycle would gradually remove the excess concentration currently in the atmosphere. I don't know how long it might take, several centuries at least I suppose.
- orwin 4y agoNo, it's too late, we won't ever get back to last century climate, Oxydes are some of the most stable molecules on earth, so the only way to get them out of the mid to high troposphere (where it actually have an impact) is to lower their concentration in the low troposphere. At the moment, the CO2 you emit will take roughly 20 year before it has an impact on climate (the time to reach the altitude necessary for the re-emission to cause real harm). When we start planting trees and let the ocean capture the Co2 (they will acidify, but fuck the plankton and corals at that point, we can't do anything about that), then it will start to get better. It will take roughly five hundreds years to eliminate half of our past an current emission (if we stop in 2050) and ten thousand to get back to 1850 climate. So, yeah, it will settle back, but in a long, long time.
- xzjis 4y agoFucking the plankton isn't a good idea when the phytoplankton absorb 40% of all CO2 emissions. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_carbon
- orwin 4y agoIt won't fuck the phytoplankton that much, it is the zooplankton that will suffer (and yes, this will have effect on the phytoplankton, but like I said in another comment, consequences are too hard to evaluate.
- wizofaus 4y ago10 thousand years is a little longer than I was thinking, but OK - it's a lot less than the millions mentioned by the GP.